Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

I’d hesitate to say [Obama’s] a Marxist or an Elitist

Think Progress reports:

On the Brian and the Judge radio show today, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano asked Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT): ...

NAPITALIANO: Hey Sen. Lieberman, you know Barack Obama, is he a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case in today’s New York Times? Is he an elitist like your colleague Hillary Clinton says he is?

LIEBERMAN: Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question. I know him now for a little more than three years since he came into the Senate and he’s obviously very smart and he’s a good guy. I will tell ya that during this campaign, I’ve learned some things about him, about the kind of environment from which he came ideologically. And I wouldn’t…I’d hesitate to say he’s a Marxist, but he’s got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.

When I think about Obama, I am reminded of Richard Epstein’s observation that in order to remain politically viable modern socialists no longer advocate direct government ownership of production. Instead, modern socialism operates on two different levels: “At a personal level, it speaks to the alienation of the individual, stressing the need for caring and sharing and the politics of meaning. At a regulatory level, it seeks to identify specific sectors in which there is a market failure and then to subject them to various forms of government regulation.” Sounds a lot like Obama’s stump speech to me.

In turn, the current flap over whether Obama or Hillary Clinton is the more elitist reminds me of something Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote quite a while back:

The fact is that we now find ourselves with two alienated classes. It is alienation that distinguishes today’s overclass from the ruling classes of the past. A ruling class that discreetly disguised its role in deference to democratic sensibilities was by most Americans thought to be bearable and even admirable, especially as its privileges were thought to be derived from breeding and achievement. The overclass is something else. As the word suggests, it is marked by an overbearing quality; it presents itself as being over and against the American people but is quite unable to give any good reasons for its pretensions to superiority.

The encouraging thing is that an overclass cannot sustain itself as a ruling class because it offers no argument for its right to rule. Assumed superiority is not an argument. The overclass that emerged from the 1960s deconstructed the moral foundations of its current privilege by its relentless attack on all traditional justifications of privilege. Proponents of permanent revolution are hard put to call for a pause in the revolution in order to allow them to savor their triumph. They cannot recall from the political culture the passions and prejudices which they employed in overthrowing the establishment, and by which they are now being overthrown. Today’s moment of populist insurrection is commonly called traditionalist, but it is in large part a continuation of the revolution of the sixties, now directed against the revolutionaries of the overclass who seized the commanding heights of culture.

Their perch on the heights is most precarious. In ways beyond numbering, Americans are railing at the governmental, media, and university elites, declaring that they have had enough and are not going to take it anymore. Rather than perching on the heights, it may be more accurate to say that these elites have retreated to protective enclaves in search of refuge against an angry and ungrateful populace. There they find solace among their own kind. In undisturbed caucus they propound the true socialism that has been betrayed by every socialism tried; their network anchorpersons sound nightly alarums against the ascendant fascism of Christian conservatives; and they churn out unreadable academic deconstructions of elitism, turning a blind eye to the elite that they are. Or the elite that for one shining moment—a Camelot, so to speak—they thought themselves to be. But now the enclaves are shadowed by the suspicion that they are only talking to themselves. Outside, the barbarians are taking over....

Whether called the knowledge class, the new class, or the overclass, today it is tottering, and it knows it. The campaign of liberation from the traditional meanings that give life meaning met with such popular hostility that some of the overclass had second thoughts. From out of one defensive enclave rode a paladin of high spiritual purpose proposing nothing less than a “politics of meaning.” A puzzled populace, not knowing what was meant by meaning but recognizing the politics, politely declined the proposal. The politics may be disguised for the nonce, and there may be another election or two to be won, but the rule of the overclass is drawing to a close.

A generation that was born, nursed, and reared by the overclass, that never knew anything but the overclass, must finally fall back upon sounding a final trumpet for the nostrum that first roused it to political consciousness: The American people want change! The American people warmly agree. And so it was, future historians will note, that the overclass rode off into the sunset astride the weary old charger named Change, the very horse on which it had arrived.

These days the charger is named “Changed we can believe in,” but the point remains true.

BTW, hunting down that quote lead to another Neuhaus gem:

Michael Lerner is credited with having put the First Lady on to “the politics of meaning,” although she says she met with him but once, and that only for fifteen minutes or less.  On the other hand, it has been reported that she sometimes has memory problems.